Teledyne Significantly Increases Bottom-tracking Range

Teledyne RD Instruments (TRDI) has released a new proprietary Extended Range Tracking (XRT) option which, according to the company, is capable of extending the bottom-tracking range of its Pathfinder and Pioneer doppler velocity logs (DVL) by 60%. This latest development allows users to attain bottom lock faster and more efficiently than ever before, further increasing user control and confidence during subsea missions. Extensive in-house and customer testing has proven this extended range in a wide array of conditions and terrains and has in fact exceeded design expectations.

Grant Jennings, director of navigation product line at TRDI, explains: “We have seen an increase in smaller vehicles operating to greater depths. Our 38kHz DVLs can bottom track to over 2,500m and our 150kHz DVLs can bottom track to over 500m, but these products are too large to use on the emerging smaller-class vehicles. TRDI’s 30 years of Doppler signal processing experience has allowed us to develop a new algorithm that combines the strengths of narrowband with our proven broadband signal processing, giving us the unique combination of the improved range of a narrowband signal, with the proven reliable bottom detection of a broadband signal.”